We’re here to get Britain building, by providing bespoke development finance to SME property developers in underserved regions. We’ll also offer savings rates that the UK public will love.

Only around half of the government’s housebuilding target is being met . Alongside availability of land and planning permission, access to finance is a key driver of this.

One third of property developers have had an application for finance declined. A similar number have even avoided applying for finance, fearing rejection .
The problem is made worse for SMEs generally, where 46% have had difficulty accessing finance . This is mirrored in property development, where existing lenders focus on higher loan values .

Property developers outside London and the South East are struggling even more – just 26% of lenders have lent to those in the north of England , for example.

GBB is determined to be a powerful force in reversing these trends and making a tangible impact in property development in the UK.

A Highly Focussed Lender

Property Development Specialist

Deep expertise of property development and SME lending

Exclusively SME

With loans sizes up to £5m and flexible terms, we’re here for SMEs

A Champion for the Regions

We’ll be pouring our heart, soul and £millions into regional development

Building Long Term Relationships

Locally-based relationship managers will be dedicated to customer needs

We started off in late 2017 as a team of four with a big vision.

We quickly scaled to an enthusiastic bunch of 15 in early 2018 and moved to our office at The Stamp Exchange, just a stone’s throw away from Newcastle Central Station. After some constructive feedback from the regulator, we refined and submitted a second version of the RBP.

2019 then saw a flurry of yet more activity, as we developed a detailed model to forecast our financial performance and the first wave of our policies. We also performed a range of stress tests on our business model to demonstrate to the regulator that our plan is robust from a capital and liquidity point of view, summarised in our ICAAP and ILAAP documents.

We got some great feedback on our RBP, ICAAP and ILAAP documents, and we were happy to learn that the quality of our submissions to the regulator were such that a further round of business model review wasn’t needed.

All of this culminated in some tremendous news in December of 2019 – we were invited to apply for a bank licence!

We were thrilled to submit our application for a bank licence on the 16th of January 2020.

The regulator now has a maximum of 12 months to assess our application, although it could be as little six months. If we’re successful, we’ll get the first stage of approval, called “Authorisation with Restriction”. This gives us a further 6-12 months to test our systems, during a period called “Mobilisation”, after which we’re hoping to have a full licence with no restrictions, enabling us to start trading.

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